The stock of operational robots around the globe hit a new record of about 3.9 million units. This demand is driven by a number of exciting technological innovations. The International Federation of Robotics reports about the top 5 automation trends in 2024:
The model delivers dramatically enhanced performance, with a breakthrough in long-context understanding across modalities.
The model delivers dramatically enhanced performance, with a breakthrough in long-context understanding across modalities.
The model delivers dramatically enhanced performance, with a breakthrough in long-context understanding across modalities.
Hardware businesses are notoriously challenging in the vast, dynamic world of startups. There are over 72,500 startups in the U.S. alone, yet only half have a survival rate beyond five years. In hardware startups, the stats are even worse.
Scientists have been trying to build snakelike, limbless robots for decades. These robots could come in handy in search-and-rescue situations, where they could navigate collapsed buildings to find and assist survivors.
"This successful demo underscored two important mission enablers--the ability to deploy Reliable’s control station wherever the Air Force needs and convert existing aircraft using our aircraft-agnostic autonomous flight system." —Reliable’s Dr. David O’Brien
Cotton is one of the most valuable crops grown in the U.S., with a harvest value of some US$7 billion yearly. It is cultivated across a crescent of 17 states stretching from Virginia to California and is used in virtually every type of clothing, as well as in medical supplies and home goods such as upholstery.
With a brief squeeze, you know whether an avocado, peach or tomato is ripe. This is what a soft robot hand also does, for example, during automated harvesting. However, up until now, such a gripper needed sensors in its 'fingers' to determine whether the fruit was ripe enough.
A new type of tool changer now turns the specialist for large series into a flexible all-rounder, with which even small series and individual pieces can be produced economically.
Fossils of a marine animal that lived 500 million years ago, combined with computer simulations, informed the design of a new soft robot.
Engineers have studied how insects navigate, for the purpose of developing energy-efficient robots.
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have furthered a new type of soft material that can change shape in response to light, a discovery that could advance "soft machines" for a variety of fields, from robotics to medicine.
With a brain the size of a pinhead, insects perform fantastic navigational feats. They avoid obstacles and move through small openings. How do they do this with their limited brain power? Understanding the inner workings of an insect's brain can help us in our search towards energy-efficient computing; physicist Elisabetta Chicca of the University of Groningen demonstrates with her most recent result: a robot that acts like an insect.
Researchers have proposed a new strategy for the shape assembly of robot swarms based on the idea of mean-shift exploration: When a robot is surrounded by neighboring robots and unoccupied locations, it actively gives up its current location by exploring the highest density of nearby unoccupied locations in the desired shape.